ZFS Object Storage (proof of concept)
3 points · Open discussionopenzfs
zfs
C2013–2026
openzfs / zfs
zfs
OpenZFS on Linux and FreeBSD
226Distinct people
423Mentions
4Explicit recommenders
12.6KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
OpenZFS on Linux and FreeBSD
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
I will soon prepare some scripts to do that, but I first want to confirm the core ideas and design something that I will only have to do once, and the discussion on…
csdvrx used a recommendation phrase. 4 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- freebsd/freebsd-src · linked in 2 of the same discussions
- illumos/illumos-gate · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year423 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2013-03-29 20:43:14 UTC to 2026-10-12 18:23:23 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 17 | 0 | 17 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 25 | 3 | 22 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 32 | 4 | 28 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 2 | 8 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 29 | 9 | 20 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 50 | 14 | 36 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 29 | 8 | 21 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 31 | 3 | 28 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 86 | 13 | 73 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 40 | 6 | 34 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 59 | 7 | 52 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 3 | 7 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 12, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
OpenZFS is an advanced file system and volume manager which was originally
developed for Solaris and is now maintained by the OpenZFS community.
This repository contains the code for running OpenZFS on Linux and FreeBSD.
Official Resources
Documentation - for using and developing this repo
ZoL site - Linux release info & links
Mailing lists
OpenZFS site - for conference videos and info on other platforms (illumos, OSX, Windows, etc)
Installation
Full documentation for installing OpenZFS on your favorite operating system can
be found at the Getting Started Page.
Contribute & Develop
We have a separate document with contribution guidelines.
We have a Code of Conduct.
Release
OpenZFS is released under a CDDL license.
For more details see the NOTICE, LICENSE and COPYRIGHT files; UCRL-CODE-235197
Supported Kernels and Distributions
Linux
Given the wide variety of Linux environments, we prioritize development and testing on stable, supported kernels and distributions.
Kernel (kernel.org)
All longterm kernels from kernel.org are supported. stable kernels are usually supported in the next OpenZFS release.
Supported longterm kernels: 6.18, 6.12, 6.6, 6.1, 5.15, 5.10.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
All RHEL (and compatible systems: AlmaLinux OS, Rocky Linux, etc) on the full or maintenance support tracks are supported.
Supported RHEL releases: 8.10, 9.7, 10.1.
Ubuntu
All Ubuntu LTS releases are supported.
Supported Ubuntu releases: 26.04 “Resolute”, 24.04 “Noble”, 22.04 “Jammy”.
Debian
All Debian stable and LTS releases are supported.
Supported Debian releases: 13 “Trixie”, 12 “Bookworm”, 11 “Bullseye”.
Other Distributions
Generally, if a distribution is following an LTS kernel, it should work well with OpenZFS.
FreeBSD
All FreeBSD releases receiving security support are supported by OpenZFS.
Supported FreeBSD releases: 15.1, 14.4.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
423 sources99.26% storage reduction with exact reconstruction on 100-version repo
2 points · Open discussionGreat job for bringing up new apple's silicon chip , m4 a18 to linux . I hope the project keep alive and maintained , and if you can't mainline it , remmber many other project do out-of-tree version well maintained [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] .
[1]: https://github.com/Rust-for-Linux/linux Rust for Linux
[2]: https://android.googlesource.com/kernel/common/ Android OS linux kernel
[3]: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs OpenZFS kernel module
[4]: https://github.com/awemorris/linux-pc98 Linux pc98 / 32 bit x86
[5]: https://github.com/OpenDingux/linux Linux on retro gaming device
[6]: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux Linux on older apple silicon M1/M2/M3 chip
[7]: https://github.com/microsoft/wsl2-linux-kernel Linux on Windows
In Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One MonthFair warning with ZFS: do not turn on deduplication at the moment.
There is a straight up data loss bug in 2.4.3 (zeroed out files, totally silent).
https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/18366
This caused all sorts of grief at day job where dedupe was useful for a big cache. Conversely I've run ZFS at home for like 15 years at this point without trouble. But this one is an absolute nightmare.
In Creating backup storage sucksklarasystems.com | Senior OpenZFS Developer | REMOTE | Full-time Contract
We have successfully hired from HN in previous rounds and are looking for another OpenZFS Developer (4+ years of experience) to join our team!
Klara Inc. provides development & solutions focused on open source software and the community-driven development of OpenZFS and FreeBSD. We develop new features, investigate/fix bugs, and support the community of these important open source infrastructure projects. Some of our recent work includes major ZFS features such as Fast Deduplication (OpenZFS 2.3) and AnyRAID: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/17567 https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/18406
We’re looking for an OpenZFS Developer with:
- Strong C programming skills and understanding of data structures
- Experience with file systems, VFS, and OS internals (threading,
Read the rest
locking, IPC, memory management)
- Familiarity with ZFS internals (DMU, MOS, vdevs, ZPL, datasets, boot environments)
- Ability to work across Linux, and FreeBSD environments
Previous upstream contributions to OpenZFS or other open source projects are a big plus.
Submit an application through our site: https://klarasystems.com/careers/openzfs-developer/
OpenZFS: Implement FIDEDUPERANGE via block cloning
1 points · Open discussion> Running ZFS on anything but Solaris/Illumos/FreeBSD is asinine.
> ZFS is a permanent second-class citizen on Linux
Linux is the primary target of OpenZFS [0] [1], and has been since 2020 [2]. It may not be supported by the Linux kernel developers, but it's supported by the ZFS developers, and that's all that really matters.
> I don't want to trust my data to some half-assed out-of-tree solution that may or may not break in a week.
Sure, it's an out-of-tree module, but that doesn't mean that it will randomly break all the time; it just means that you may occasionally need to wait for a new OpenZFS release before upgrading your kernel.
> FreeBSD ZFS support has matured and is outstanding.
Agreed, but Linux and FreeBSD both use the same ZFS [3], so I don't really see how the ZFS in FreeBSD can be better than the one in Linux. The tooling a
Read the rest
nd install procedure is certainly better on FreeBSD, but the actual filesystem code is the same (and is probably slightly more robust on Linux since that's going to be where most of the testing occurs).
[0]: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs#supported-kernels-and-distrib...
[1]: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/8987
[2]: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/releases/tag/zfs-2.0.0
[3]: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/zfs/
Not a great time price-wise to be building a NAS, but I have been doing so for the last two weeks. Inside a Jonsbo N6 case, which is pretty nice with an 8x SATA backplane and drive bays (unlike the earlier Jonsbo variants).
I ended up on shucking 4x the 14 TB WD Elements Desktop. They contain helium drives, the WD140EDGZ in my case, and are about a third cheaper than 4x the 12 TB WD Red Plus drives (which are air-filled). The shucking was easier than I expected too, and the performance seems very comparable. The warranty is a definite downside (European, so no Magnuson-Moss), but I think I can even get them back in their enclosure should they fail during the 2-year warranty period.
I've put some second hand 256 GB M.2 SSDs in there as boot drives. It was a bit of a struggle to get it to work in a way that failure of one of the drives does
Read the rest
n't hold up booting, combined with LUKS, TPM keys and ZFS on root. Learned a lot about systemd-boot which I have never used before, but feels a lot saner to me than grub ever was. So now I have a large script which debootstraps a Debian based NAS into being.
I noticed that there are a lot of ZFS myths and cargo culting. For example TFA mentions ECC RAM, which in some circles is a must-have because ZFS would wreck your pool during a scrub otherwise, which is a myth. It's also very expensive, especially this year. You also don't need much RAM for ZFS, L2ARC doesn't use much RAM at all, to name a few others.
Still doubting about setting `dnodesize=auto` (which is the default), because there are some horror stories about that [1]. And it seems impossible to find a cloud storage provider with reasonable prices that supports `zfs send`. Rsync.net upped their minimum order to 10 TiB recently, which is far too much for my use case.
[1] https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/11353
[2] https://www.rsync.net/products/zfsintro.html
Two examples that I can find are https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/7910, where very old versions of ZFS appear to have quietly written slightly incorrect ACL information, and https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/zfs-linux/+bug/190... where Ubuntu 21.10 shipped with a bug that created corrupted ZFS filesystems. I believe https://www.illumos.org/issues/9847 may be another example of this, although less severe, where ZFS leaked disk space under some circumstances.
In Understanding ZFS Scrubs and Data Integrity> Can you give a more concrete example of what you mean?
There's been several instances. For example, the send/receive code has had bugs leading to cases[1] where the checksum and hence scrub look fine but the data is not.
edit: the recent block cloning has also had some issues, eg[2][3].
I'm pretty sure it's also possible for hardware errors like bad memory to cause the data to get corrupted but the checksum gets computed on the corrupted data, thus it looks ok when scrubbed.
[1]: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/4809
[2]: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/15526
[3]: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/15933
In Understanding ZFS Scrubs and Data IntegrityOpenZFS 2.4.0: Encryption Performance Improvements
4 points · Open discussionklarasystems.com | OpenZFS Developer | REMOTE | Full-time Contract
We successfully hired from HN in the previous round and are looking for another OpenZFS Developer (3+ years of experience) to join our team!
Klara Inc. provides development & solutions focused on open source software and the community-driven development of OpenZFS and FreeBSD. We develop new features, investigate/fix bugs, and support the community of these important open source infrastructure projects. Some of our recent work includes major ZFS features such as Fast Deduplication (OpenZFS 2.3: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/discussions/15896) and AnyRAID: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/17567.
We’re looking for an OpenZFS Developer with:
- Strong C programming skills and solid understanding of data structures
- Experience with file systems, VFS, and OS internals (thre
Read the rest
ading, locking, IPC, memory management)
- Familiarity with ZFS internals (DMU, MOS, vdevs, ZPL, datasets, boot environments)
- Ability to work across Linux, FreeBSD, or illumos environments
Previous upstream contributions to OpenZFS or other open source projects are a big plus.
Submit an application through our site: https://klarasystems.com/careers/openzfs-developer/
Have you considered "reflinks"? Supported as of [OpenZFS 2.2](https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/13392).
Haven't used them yet myself but seems like a nice use case for things like minor metadata changes to media files. The bulk of the file is shared and only the delta between the two are saved.
In DIY NAS: 2026 Edition> Ideally I'd want a read-only root FS with maybe an /etc and /var managed by an overlay.
OpenZFS 2.2 added support for overlays, so you can have the main pool(s) mounted as read-only:
* https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/releases/tag/zfs-2.2.0
In Moving from OpenBSD to FreeBSD for firewallsZFS has a very nice set of macros that work very well:
https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/blob/master/include/os/freebs...
See P2PHRASE() and friends. They were inherited from OpenSolaris.
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